South Riding

by Winifred Holtby

  “I’m sorry. That was exasperating. Can you telephone—or wire?”

  “What’s the use now? It’s too late.”

  Often before Sarah had infuriated her colleagues by suggesting remedies instead of grievances. She had not yet recognised the human preference for complaint.

  “I’m sure no one will be sorrier than Miss Parsons. Of course it was an accident. She’s probably rather flurried and exhausted. I think we shall have to make allowances for her. She’s had an awful term.”

  “That doesn’t excuse her. And it doesn’t give me back my lost appointment. It’s all very well for you to be tolerant, but you know she’s a born muddler. Oh, I shall be glad to get out of this teaching profession. It’s all very well for you. You don’t have to spend day after day in the staff room, with the Sigglesthwaite groaning on one side of you, and the Parson chirruping on the other.”

  “Neither do you. You have your own rooms, you know. What did you want me to do?”

  “Talk to Miss Parsons. Impress upon her about the letters. Or take them out of her hands. This isn’t the first time that there have been muddles.”

  “I’ll see her.”

  When Dolores Jameson had flounced away, Sarah scolded herself.

  I manage her badly because I despise her. I let her be familiar and impertinent because I dislike her so much that I don’t even trouble to keep her in her place. Heaven send that Pip never tires of his engagement! If only he’d marry her this summer.

  Sarah sighed.

  She sent for Miss Parsons, expecting fluttering repentance. But far from displaying contrition for her negligence the matron broke in quivering with a grievance of her own.

  “It’s no use, Miss Burton. I’ve tried and tried! An archangel himself couldn’t manage all I have to do with an untrained housemaid for the serving. What do you think the girl’s done now? I told her to put round the clean linen in the boarders’ cubicles, with the towels folded inside the sheets and pillowcase, so that there’d be no question of them blowing away as Gwynneth said hers did, earlier this term, and would you believe it? When I went my rounds there was the linen put on the beds with the towels wrapped round outside each bundle!”

  “And what did you do?” asked Sarah, genuinely eager to learn why Miss Parsons appeared perennially overworked.

  “Of course I went round with her and made her refold all the bundles with the towels inside. But she was very sulky, and most impertinent, and if I have to spend my whole time redoing her work for her, I might as well have no help at all!”

  Sarah looked at Miss Parsons. She was a woman ten years older than herself, who might have been any age over fifty— gentle, loyal, devoted, but a born muddler, with a muddler’s irrational spurts of vindictive anger.

  She said quietly, “Of course, it’s your own department. You must run it your own way, Miss Parsons. But don’t you think next time it might be a good idea just to tell the girl what’s wrong and how you want things done, but to spare yourself the exhausting business of doing it all over again?”

  But the muddler’s obstinacy shone in Miss Parsons’ eye. She was sure that she was right, and she spent ten minutes explaining to Sarah just why no other methods except her own were practicable.

  Sarah was patient. She knew that the matron was near the end of her tether after a gruelling term, and that her fussy incompetence with domestic routine was a negligible disadvantage weighed against her real devotion to the school, the girls, even to the dilapidated buildings, and her unselfishness in times of illness and crisis. Quarter of an hour spent in ventilating grievances was not time wasted.

  When the storm was momentarily checked, she observed amicably:

  “There’s just one other thing I wanted to ask. Exactly what is the procedure with the staff letters, Miss Parsons? You take the whole bag from the postman, don’t you? You sort them— and then—just what happens?”

  The matron flushed.

  “I suppose Miss Jameson’s been here. Well. She’s second mistress, and no doubt she has a certain right to report misconduct among her inferiors. But even I have my dignity, Miss Burton. I may not have a university degree and all that, but I have my dignity. I am not an office boy to carry messages.”

  “No, of course not. I was only going to suggest that when a letter has been accidentally delayed, it would be better perhaps to send it immediately to its owner.”

  “Accidentally. So she admitted to you it was an accident, did she? She wouldn’t to me, Miss Burton. She seemed to think I did it on purpose. Really, she’s insufferable. She was bad enough before she became engaged, but ever since she’s been impossible.” The facile tears swam in the matron’s eyes. Her round indeterminate face crumpled. “Now I suppose I’m talking exactly as she thinks I talk. She’s always sneering at unmarried women. She seems to think that either we all envy her her wretched little fiancé, or that we’re frozen and inhuman and all riddled with complexes. It’s not kind and it’s not nice and it’s not good for the girls.”

  “I agree with you,” said Sarah. “I agree entirely. There’s too much fuss about virginity and its opposite altogether. And I think Miss Jameson may have been reading too many of those rather silly books that profess to serve up potted psychology. It’s very silly. But you know,”—her voice grew soft and persuasive—“I’m rather sorry for Miss Jameson. I feel that we shall have to be a little tolerant with her. She’s not a young girl, you know, and this engagement seems to have gone to her head a bit. I understand that she’s waited two years now for this young man’s promotion and there’s still no word of it. It must be very trying for her—tiresome for us too, perhaps. But what I feel is—there’s probably a very real fear of loneliness and old age behind all this pose of superiority. You see, she’s not naturally a very lovable person, is she? If she doesn’t marry, I’m afraid she may one day feel terribly isolated.”

  “Oh,” said Miss Parsons, sitting down and looking across the desk at Sarah. “Oh—I—I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “You see.” Sarah smiled, subtle, honey-sweet. “I expect it’s rather difficult for affectionate and motherly natures like your own, Miss Parsons, which find it perfectly natural to love and be loved, to realise how desperately and fiercely possessive a lonely egotist feels about any symbol of attractiveness she may acquire. Miss Jameson’s engagement ring is a tremendous thing to her. A sign that someone really loves her and wants to live with her, and that she returns that love. I shouldn’t be surprised if this young man were the only creature whom she has ever loved. So it’s not wonderful that she clings to him and all he stands for, with a rather pathetic vehemence. It’s very real and terrible—to fear an unloved old age. A woman like you, perhaps, can hardly realise. I don’t suppose you’ve ever bothered, have you, about loneliness?”

  “No,” muttered the matron. “No. I don’t believe I have.”

  Lord, what a prig I sound! thought Sarah ruefully. But it’s the only way. I can’t have that harridan ruining my staff. And it’s true. God knows it’s true.

  “You see—I know better than you do because I’m an egotist myself,” she confessed disarmingly. “I like people to do what I want and they generally do it. So that being with others doesn’t mean constant sacrifice for me. I expect that for unselfish people, it’s rather a pleasant change to be alone, isn’t it? I mean, then you can indulge in all your own little likes and dislikes—have the windows open or shut as you please, and choose the biggest strawberries, and all that?”

  “Why—yes,” said Miss Parsons in mild surprise, seeing herself now, not as Miss Jameson saw her, an envious, embittered and frustrated spinster, but as Miss Burton saw her, a woman of warm heart, naturally lovable and loving, the generous friend of those dear naughty girls.

  The Parson, they called her. Good old Reverend. She smiled at the thought of them. She had been their slave for twenty years, but the fingers that she had bandaged, the tears that she had dried, the cough lozenges and cod-liver oil that she had bought
with her own money to give to day-girls— since she was too scrupulous to dose them with boarders’ medicines—all became part of an unconscious insurance by which she had bought freedom from the fear of loneliness.

  For of course she had never dreaded retirement; the thought of being alone held no terrors for her; it was a luxury. All her life she had loved and served and given, so that her own company meant not deprivation, but a little relaxation in which she might pander to her own neglected preferences. She knew exactly how she would live when she left the High School. She would have her pension. She would have her memories. All her human appetites for love and self-sacrifice would have been amply satisfied. She would take a little cottage, or rooms with some nice woman; she would have a wireless set, a dog, a subscription to Boots’ Library. Old girls would come to tea, and she would give them iced cakes and strawberries in summer time. Sometimes they would invite her to attend speech days and school concerts. They would bring their babies or young men to see her. When she was alone, she could muddle along happily in her own way. She could eat bread and treacle for supper when she fancied, wear bedroom slippers all day if she felt like it, and rest, after her long and faithful service.

  Miss Jameson was wrong. She had not been frustrated. She had loved and served and feared and hoped and given. She had enriched herself immeasurably by the renunciation of possessions. All over Yorkshire, in farm-houses and shops and villas, lingered the memory of her unstinted service. Miss Parsons knew that in a hundred homes women thought of her, and would think, with affection—a little amused, a little critical perhaps, but they were grateful to her. Good old Reverend. She had her reward. She wondered that she had never thought much of these things before. She smiled radiantly into the light intelligent eyes of her head mistress.

  “Well, my dear,” she said. “Forgive me—Miss Burton, I mean. But, of course, I am older than you, and, as you say, a bit motherly, perhaps, if not always very clever and I dare say you’re right. You often are, you know. And it’s been a very tiring term. I’ll try to remember about poor Miss Jameson. I ought to have thought of all that for myself. You’ve done me good, you know.”

  Smiling and pacified, Miss Parsons then withdrew.

  But Sarah sat staring at her ink-stained fingers. “You’ve done me good,” she repeated—the satisfaction of the dominating, who draw nourishment from other people’s troubles. The poor have we always with us.

  She never disliked herself more than when she had poured the oil of flattery on the school’s troubled waters.

  Yet was it flattery? Wasn’t it only truth? Had she not dealt with the two women justly—to say nothing about the bewildered new young serving-maid, wrapping towels round pillow-cases, or pillow-cases round towels. Oh, what did it matter?

  What then did matter?

  These rumours of Hitler’s Nazi movement in Germany? There swam before her tired mind the memory of that summer holiday in the Black Forest, of tables outside a vine-wreathed inn, and Ernst, lean, brown and eager, in the khaki shirt and shorts worn by hundreds of young Communists— drinking her health in beer after a long strenuous walk. Ernst, who wanted peace and comradeship and a mystical unity of like-minded youth—Ernst whose mother had been a Jewess . . . Ernst, who had disappeared, and who had, some said, been beaten to death at the Dachau concentration camp. These things happened to one’s friends. They were important. It was important that two years ago Sarah had attended a meeting of German teachers and professional women, serious, dogmatic, experienced—decent women, sincere in their intentions. And to-day? Where were they? Under what sad compromises were their bright hopes buried? By what specious arguments did they defend their present standards?

  She thought of her own dreams for the world. In her desk lay notes, neatly clipped and arranged in coloured folders, of her talks on current affairs—The growth of world unity—The task of an International Labour Organisation—The League grows up—Disarmament. Beyond her personal troubles lay the deep fatigue of one whose impersonal hopes do not march with history.

  Am I doing any good here? she asked herself, seeing all that was imperfect in her school, her failures in diplomacy, her impatience with the governors, her betrayal of Lydia Holly. She ought somehow to have found a way to keep that girl at school. She ought to have saved Miss Sigglesthwaite’s dignity. She ought . . .

  Running a staff, she thought, was like controlling an experimental factory for high explosives. At any moment the stuff might go off from quite unexpected causes. No permanent peace was possible.

  But did she want peace?

  Miss Parsons’ humble dream of tranquillity was not hers. She was not humble at all. She had unlimited confidence in her own ability.

  Yet, if so, why was she here, coping with a matron’s grievances about towels, or a governor’s eccentricity over grocers’ contracts? Surely her place was out in the big world fighting for those principles in which she so deeply believed.

  She searched her heart. This is my school. I do what I like wth my own.

  Her mouth set in a thin line. She drew note-paper towards her. She returned to her interminable letter-writing to Mrs. Rossiter about Laura’s quarantine, to Mrs. Twiggs, a prospective parent, arranging an appointment, to Colonel Collier about the playing-field—twenty-three letters.

  At half-past six she put her letters on the post tray, filled her case with senior history examination papers to be corrected, put on her hat and closed her office for the day.

  It was a perfect July evening. The little town swam in warm liquid light. From the height of North Cliff Sarah could look down upon the uneven roofs of grey slate and red tiling, the bare forest of wireless posts, strung with a fine cobweb of aerials, the motley crowd along the esplanade, the wide stretch of the sands. The formlessness and disorder of the place attracted her. It was raw material. She wanted to make use of it—she was not afraid of hard work or responsibility or isolation, but she feared futility and failure. She feared the waste of her ability and vigour on ill-judged enterprise. Am I a fool? she asked herself. Is it worth while?

  On the pale flattened sea a fishing boat, a mile or more away, trailed its widening spearhead of ripples across the surface. If I could sail in one of these, thought Sarah. Her head ached. The heavy case of papers to be corrected dragged at her arm.

  She let herself into her house, where still three measles cases were accommodated in her first-floor bedrooms. She sat down to an hour’s work at her papers. At eight o’clock she and the nurse ate a cold supper together. Later, she climbed up to the attic where she had slept during the measles epidemic.

  She liked the attic. Its dormer window faced westward across the outskirts of the town to the fields beyond, where already a group of tents had been pitched by holiday-makers. Sometimes at night Sarah looked out and saw them glowing like convolvulus flowers lit from within, lying mouth downward on the darkening field. Once she had heard music. Sometimes laughter. These sights and sounds gave her great pleasure. Music and lantern light and laughter seemed to her proper accompaniments for youth in summer-time.

  But this evening, being mid-week, the camp was deserted —no laughing boys dragged out their mattresses to air on the sun-baked turf, no girls tossed paraffin recklessly on to smoking fires. The sun dipped below the flat horizon. From the houses pin-points of light appeared. Now on the allotment an old man called his hens. Now the revolving lamp from the lighthouse trailed its pale wand of light across the landscape. Now the lights of a car swept down the Hardrascliffe Road and disappeared. Now from the stile at its western end two figures, a boy’s and a girl’s, entered the campers’ field.

  Sarah watched them idly, her elbows on her window-sill, her pointed chin propped on her hands, the cool breeze fanning her aching head.

  The boy and the girl did not cross the field directly; they kept to the shadow of the hedge, moving furtively. When they came to the point opposite to the tents, the boy went forward. Sarah could hear his low unanswered whistle. He approached a tent and
, kneeling, undid the flaps and threw them open. Then he went round the enclosure, peering into all the others. No one was there. The camp was empty. He beckoned to the girl.

  Sarah watched her move across towards him, slowly, as though reluctant yet drawn by an irresistible attraction.

  She knew quite well what drama of youth and folly and love she was observing. Those children thought that nobody could see them.

  The boy vanished inside the tent, the girl stood outside. Her dark figure was outlined against the dun grey canvas. With a queer little gesture of defiance, she pulled off her beret, and Sarah could see how she tossed the thick fair hair that hung about her shoulders and turned her head slowly, from south to north, surveying the town as though taking leave of her familiar childhood.

  She waited so long that the boy came out again to her. In the growing twilight their figures remained separate, and to Sarah flashed the thought: She’s going to fail him. She’s going to run away at the last moment; and, without criticising the wisdom of her foreboding, she felt she could not bear it for him—if the girl should fail him now.

  But the boy put out both hands, and the girl took them, and he drew her in after him to the open tent and closed the flaps behind them, and soon tent and field alike dissolved in darkness.

  Sarah stood entranced, until her lulled reason reasserted itself. “What have I done?” she asked; “perhaps that’s one of my girls.” It was too late to run out of her house now, to follow the two and interrupt that childish and potentially tragic honeymoon. The lovers were lovers now, and no long arm of discipline, morality or wisdom could undo what they had done together.

  But what astonished Sarah was not her acquiescence, nor her recollection of the brief pain that pierced her when, for an instant, she had thought that the girl was going to run away, it was the realisation that when the boy had held his hands out, her imagination had seen in the dusk hands held out to her also; her ears had heard a whispered invitation, and her dreaming mind had devised the vision of a face smiling up at her ardently from the shadows. And the face and the voice and the hands were those of her antagonist, the governor, the councillor, the father of Midge, Robert Carne of Maythorpe.